A media player is an application or a device for playing back multimedia files. Generally, a media player supports one or more specific media types, such as audios, videos and images. Examples of a media player include a music player, a movie player, a photo management system, etc.
A media player can be used to stream or play back media data from an online broadcaster. Examples of an online broadcaster include the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), the National Public Radio (NPR), YouTube, Hulu, etc. Broadcasters seldom use industry recognized standards to share their data. A broadcaster typically does not provide a user with a computer-readable listing of programs available for download. Even if a broadcaster provides such a listing, gathering all the contents available from the broadcaster might require aggregating different sources.
Conventionally, a plugin is necessary for a media player to obtain downloadable information from a broadcaster. The plugin is specific to a particular media player and a particular broadcaster. That is, the plugin cannot be shared among different media players.
For example, to support an online broadcaster's radio and television (TV) offerings with four multimedia applications, it would be necessary to add four different plugins. A first plugin adds support for the broadcaster's radio programs to a music player. A second plugin adds support for the broadcaster's TV programs to a movie player. A third plugin adds support for the broadcaster's radio and TV programs to a media center application. A fourth plugin adds support for the broadcaster's radio and TV programs to an application that makes the radio and TV programs available on a network (e.g., Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) exports to a game console, such as the Xbox, a product of the Microsoft Corporation, or the Playstation 3, a product of the SONY Corporation). These four plugins cannot be reused across different applications even though the plugins deal with the same media source. The use of a different plugin for each media application greatly increases the complexity for managing media data.